The Art of Collaboration‘This illness will not claim me, not today.’ HOAX Psychosis Blues is a work of major importance, primarily in its support of mental illness but also in its expressive collaboration that helps to deliver how sequential art can only highlight the power behind poetry. The result is a limited first edition that acts as a counterpoint to writer, Ravi Thornton’s HOAX My Lonely Heart, a theatrical production also inspired by her brother, Rob who tragically lost his fight against schizophrenia in 2008. Interspersed by Leonardo M. Giron’s subtle and expressive illustrative style, each year, Ravi reflects on key moments she observed followed by a selection of comic book artists and illustrators (Bryan Talbot and Rian Hughes to name a few) adapting a number of Rob’s poems. Heartfelt and tragic, Rob’s soul clearly resides in his collaboration, which is brought beautifully to life by a sister who has not only produced the ultimate tribute to a loved one but also a project to help others realise they are not alone in their own torment. For more information about the book and other projects, please visit: www.ravithornton.com or www.ziggyswish.co.uk[Read the original review here.]

Firstly, there are still a couple of ‘7-out-of-10-creator-signed!’ copies of HOAX Psychosis Blues available over at ziggyswish.com, if you’re looking for something super special. Secondly, that purpose I was talking about the other day, and what makes Ziggy’s Wish and its endeavours super special, is ‘social enterprise’.

“A social enterprise is an organisation that applies commercial strategies to maximize improvements in human and environmental well-being, rather than maximizing profits for external shareholders.” And that’s exactly what Ziggy’s Wish does.

The first project that Ziggy’s Wish is using to fulfill these aims is, of course, HOAX. Specifically we’re developing HOAX Psychosis Blues to be a readily available empathy tool to help reduce stigma around mental health. And in particular we’re developing the book as a training tool for medical professionals. Here’s why, courtesy of Medicine Unboxed, the medicine, arts and humanities organisation who recently shortlisted HOAX for their inaugural Creative Prize:

“Good medicine is more than a set of technical decisions and interventions involving drugs, operations or tests. It demands more of the practitioner - professionalism, empathetic care, moral consideration, insight, an understanding of human suffering and necessarily, wisdom. These attributes are not always prioritised in selecting for or training healthcare professionals, and there is little time or attention given to their authentic development within busy working environments.

“Further, there is a widening hiatus of trust, understanding and expectation between medicine and society around what constitutes good medicine. This pressingly requires real engagement around medicine’s role and society’s values.

UTTERLY DELIGHTED to have been shortlisted with project HOAX for this brilliant, illuminating prize! If we win it'll be a huge help towards funding Stage 3 of the project and fulfilling the purpose of Ziggy's Wish. More on that tomorrow.... In the meantime, fingers crossed please! "Seven artists have been shortlisted for the Medicine Unboxed Creative Prize 2014, a single £10,000 prize for a creative work that explores the interface between art and medicine.

Sam Guglani, Director and Curator of Medicine Unboxed says: "This prize, and the extraordinary entries we've seen, announce loudly that creativity and the imagination are central to medicine and at the heart of the therapeutic encounter."

Peter Thomas, Medicine Unboxed Creative Director notes: "The Medicine Unboxed Creative prize is unusual because we are aiming for the broadest possible definition of 'creative work' — we realise that there are many ways to engage with the theme of the interface between arts and medicine. It's also unusual because we didn't want just finished works. We know that artists might have work that speaks to our theme, may be exploring the theme in their ongoing work, or could be inspired to create entirely new work. Our aim is to unlock, explore and present the extraordinary creativity in the arts and medicine".

Tom De Freston, Medicine Unboxed Artist in residence and prize judge says: "The inaugural Medicine Unboxed creative prize has been an overwhelming success in its mission to encourage thoughtful and creative responses to the dialogue between medicine and the arts. The standard and range of proposals has been staggering, and the difficulty in choosing the seven shortlisted proposals is a testament to this. The fact that five of the seven shortlisted proposals have poetry at their centre is surely clear evidence of just how wrong Jeremy Paxman was to claim that contemporary poetry does not engage with 'ordinary people'."

The winner of the prize will be announced at the Medicine Unboxed: Frontiers conference that will take place on November 22-23 at the Parabola Arts Centre in Cheltenham.

The prize judges are: emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford John Carey, musician and performer Melanie Pappenheim, poet Philip Gross, novelist Rhidian Brook, and artist Tom De Freston.

So the second stage of HOAX has ended - HOAX My Lonely Heart with its sell-out run, and HOAX Psychosis Blues with its launch. I wrote the project’s ‘evaluation narrative’ for Arts Council England and the moment I’d finished that, my mind turned to other things: the third stage of HOAX; a new cross-media project I’m building called CIRCUS; and, of course, Ziggy’s Wish.

It’s Ziggy’s Wish I’ve been focused on most. Every time I see Zig looking out at me from the logo, I feel a pang. But I also draw great drive from this, remembering him, how he inspired me to set up Ziggy’s Wish in order to really try and make a difference - and how that’s now actually begun with HOAX Psychosis Blues.

Having this as our first title – such a beautifully honest account of my brother’s struggles with schizophrenia – has been a real gift. Hearing and seeing the responses from people who have read it, especially those who have suffered with mental health problems themselves, has been truly affecting. It’s clear HOAX Psychosis Blues has the power help bring about empathy, and thereby reduce stigma around mental health, and now I feel I have to make sure that power is felt.

So I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about Ziggy’s Wish, about how to develop its inner and outer workings, so that it really can become a force for good. It’s been a fairly intense few weeks of mulling and strategising, of questions and more questions, the odd lightbulb moment, then more questions again… and, as with any new endeavour, there’s been a lot of swimming around in the dark. Slowly but surely, though, things are starting to clarify. Ziggy’s Wish, its purpose, its potential… it’s all starting to take shape. And I like that shape. It feels good, but more importantly, it feels right.

[Visit Keara's twitter here.]"I met up with the other HOAX'ers Ravi Thornton (author), Karrie Fransman, Rian Hughes, Julian Hanshaw, Ian Jones, Hannah Berry and Mark Stafford (illustrators) at Gosh! Comics for a happy afternoon of signing. I met Mark, Karrie and Rian for the first time, as they weren't present at the launch last month, and they are just as lovely as everyone I've met so far. The whole afternoon was a whirlwind of squiggles and doodles, requests and new faces though there were some familiar faces as Andy Oliver from Broken Frontier came along to say hi too! I also managed to pick up Dan Berry's book Suitcase on half price which I was chuffed about. After the signings we made our way to a nice pub to finish of the day nicely."

The graphic memoir. Arguably, it’s the one strand of graphic novel publishing most responsible over the last few years for persuading those unfamiliar with the form of its integral value as a storytelling device. Comics by their very structure, and by the intricacies of their relationship with the audience, have an intimacy that allows them to share and communicate ideas in a way that no other medium can. The experience of visually digesting a comic is unique in that the reader plays an intrinsic part themselves in both driving the narrative and interacting with the layout of the page. In that regard we become almost a part of the story ourselves – we’re not just observers of events we’re also living them one person removed. Over the last decade we have seen an explosion in GNs that impart this kind of very personal experience; books that fully exploit the opportunities comics provide for eliciting an empathic emotional response with their protagonists through that special relationship they have with their readership. Of all the graphic memoirs I have read in recent years few have impressed and moved me in the way that cross-media creator Ravi Thornton’s HOAX Psychosis Blues has. I reviewed the book for Broken Frontier back in May here and also conducted an in-depth interview on its themes with Ravi here in June. HOAX follows the story of her brother Rob in the last years of his life, employing a framing sequence that charts his struggle with schizophrenia on an annual basis. Each of these segments is punctuated by a visual interpretation of one of the many poems he wrote during that time. The graphic novel was complemented by a stage show HOAX My Lonely Heart which made its debut at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre in June.Those poetry sequences are illustrated by a whole host of artistic talent, many of whom will be available to sign copies of HOAX Psychosis Blues this Saturday 19th July at London’s Gosh! Comics between 2pm and 3pm. If you’re in Soho then and want to pick up a copy of a book that represents a remarkable use of the comics form – one that was described here at BF as “a hauntingly beautiful masterpiece” – and get it signed by the very talented likes of Karrie Fransman, Mark Stafford, Rian Hughes, Hannah Berry, Julian Hanshaw, Ian Jones, Rozi Hathaway and Ravi Thornton then there’s a Facebook group here with full details or you can visit the Gosh! site here.Proceeds from the book go to mental health charities and this seems a good point to also mention Ziggy’s Wish, the publishing outfit set up by Ravi Thornton with a view to ensuring that a percentage of profits from her storytelling could be put towards charities relevant to specific work. You can find out about Ziggy’s Wish – HOAX Psychosis Blues is their first venture – on their website here, and please do consider following them on Twitter here as well and Facebook here. They’ve been tirelessly raising awareness of mental health issues on social media since the publication of HOAX and eminently deserve the small effort of clicking on that ‘Follow’ or ‘Like’ button![Read the original post here.]

The dear Prof Matt and I teaming up again to present in our own inimitable style. Here's the abstract of the talk that we gave:HOAX: A case study in cross-media and academic collaboration "A cross-media project combining a graphic novel, Psychosis Blues, with a dark musical, My Lonely Heart, HOAX is based on a selection of poems written by Ravi Thornton’s brother Roabbi, during the several-year long duration of his ultimately fatal mental illness, schizophrenia. Roabbi’s poems expressed his varying state of mind, and constitute a very honest portrayal of what it was like for him to suffer the illness. HOAX explores the story and characters around this poetry, the backstory and context for a young, mixed-race man living in an inner city, suffering from schizophrenia, primarily undiagnosed. My Lonely Heart combines music and physical theatre to relay the first part of the story (pre-diagnosis), while Psychosis Blues, uses comics form to narrate a series of episodes (post-diagnosis) interlinking nine of Roabbi’s poems. The project’s scripts thus draw on a set of dialogues between sister and brother, present and past, the living and the dead, the fictional and the real. From this dialogical matrix, the project has opened out into a series of collaborations, amongst writer, director, composer, producer, artists, book designer and, perhaps uniquely, an academic invited into the core creative team. Beginning with a reflection on the principles underpinning collaborative creation, this paper will proceed to explore what happens when the interpretative and theoretical perspectives normally brought to bear upon a finished artwork are incorporated into the process of creative production itself. Whereas the role of the participant observer has become commonplace within the social sciences, within the arts the formal inclusion of the researcher as part of the researched remains much rarer. Equally uncommon, collaboration between creator and critic at the level of academic dissemination (via co-presenting and co-writing conference papers and journal articles) opens up a number of hitherto under-explored potentialities that our paper will discuss. Whilst not overlooking the risks attendant upon collaborations of this sort, the paper will outline the ways in which projects like HOAX can transform the relationship between the academic and non-academic worlds, and strengthen the final outcome."I'd say it was our best performance yet!

This coming Friday will see the Ziggy’s Wish founder and author of HOAX Psychosis Blues, Ravi Thornton, team up with The University of Nottingham professor and academic Dr Matt Green, to speak at the Fifth International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference, hosted by the esteemed British Library. The International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference is a fantastic, annual event dedicated to really exploring the nitty-gritty, in-depth ideas and details of the comics world, and proving that comics and graphic novel can be taken seriously as an art form. Ravi and Matt will be talking about HOAX as a case study in cross-media and academic collaboration, speaking on day one of the conference this Friday (18th July), as part of a panel on collaboration and memory. Andrea Greenbaum and Penelope Mendonca will be talking on the same panel. There’s a plenty of collaboration in the HOAX project, but here Ravi and Matt will be focusing on the relationship between the two of them. We want to grow HOAX and cross-media storytelling as a valuable engagement tool, and academic research and collaboration is a huge part of that. This talk will explain how. This year the conference will focus on Production and Institution of comics, as well as Sedition and Anarchy within the genre. Talks on gender, politics, art, business and violence all intersect with comics and graphic novels at their core. It’s a smorgasbord of graphic delight for anyone with even an inkling of interest in comics as a storytelling format. We’re delighted and honoured to have our own author Ravi speaking in the event. If you're going to the conference, make sure you don’t miss her (and do please say hello).[Read the original post here.]

[Evaluation narrativeHOAX – the second stage After gaining first-stage ACE funding for the project HOAX, which allowed us to research and develop dark musical HOAX My Lonely Heart and graphic novel HOAX Psychosis Blues, we were thrilled to be successful with our second-stage ACE funding application, and to move forward with the project accordingly. Within the overall project-creation process, support for the story and its personal content was high; however, there were definite challenges in making its cross-media nature understood. Where the academic community, for example, embraced the multiple platforms being used and how they might intersect and enhance one another, artists or artistic organisations that were more used to dealing with a single media struggled to enter the cross-media discussion. Examples of this were the Director Benji Reid’s choice not to read the graphic novel, wanting instead to stay completely immersed in the show alone; and various promoters choosing only to focus on the musical as this was a ‘language set’ that they were familiar with. This resulted in what felt like compromises on the power of the project from my point of view, though I fully accept the need to respect artistic working processes. It also meant that ticket sales for the show were easier to achieve than book sales, as, although the comics community presented HOAX as a whole project, the much louder arts voice of theatre rarely did. On reflection it seems the ideal would have been to include the graphic novel in with the musical ticket price, though this would have proved impossible without subsidy. It’s an idea I’m keen to explore, however, in the third-stage of HOAX (its touring). Whilst we were delighted to secure the full amount of second-stage funding that we had asked for from ACE, another part of our funding (from The University of Notttingham) came in at £1500 less than the amount expected. With an ambitious multi-platform project like HOAX, any cuts to the budget were always going to be hard hitting, and we certainly felt the stress of losing this. It was testiment to the skill and experience of our Producer Pippa Frith that we still managed to deliver the project – mostly via agreements to reduced and delayed fees. The soundtrack development for the musical went very smoothly. Composer Minute Taker spent several months finding a unique, coherent and connected soundscape, with gentle guidance from the Director. This culminated in an intense week’s workshop between the two, which really pulled things together. The music shone out during the Royal Exchange run, so much so that the theatre invited Minute Taker back to perform in their main public space. My main focus during this period was to produce the graphic novel. Whilst I had earlier considered offering the book to mainstream publishers, I now decided to self-publish via my own small publishing endeavour Ziggy’s Wish. The reason for this was so that I could uphold my desire to donate significantly from the book sales to mental health charities – something that’s not so easy to do via mainstream publishers. This meant a great deal of management, not only of the 10 contributing illustrators, but also of the design, printing and binding process. The result is highly impactful, however, as the reviews testify to. Self-publishing HOAX Psychosis Blues presented a huge learning curve and as such was extremely time consuming. It was, though, an absolute priority within the project which meant that some of the time allocated to public engagement sessions was lost. We did, however, deliver a number of sessions on HOAX as follows: A talk at Laydeez Do Comics, Leeds; A book signing at Travelling Man Comics, Manchester; A panel talk including excerpts from the musical soundtrack at Lakes International Comics Art Festival, Kendal; A presentation at The Fifth International Graphic Novel and Comics Conference, London; The official book launch, Manchester; A book signing at GOSH! Comics, London; An aftershow talk on the third night of the musical’s run at Royal Exchange Studio Plus the four nights of the run itself. Several more engagement sessions are confirmed for the coming months, including talks on Medical Humanities at The University of Nottingham and Manchester Metropolitan University. With the soundtrack well in hand, the focus with the musical turned to castings and rehearsals. We knew from our first-stage research and development week that finding the right actors locally for all three of these very demanding roles (physically, vocally, emotionally) wasn’t going to be easy. Fortunately the first-stage R&D had secured us The Animator role in the form of Stephen Myott-Meadows, which left the roles of Rob and Helen. Luckily we were able to target cast Tachia Newall as Rob; but Helen necessitated an auditions day in London. There we secured Olivia Sweeney. All three actors were superb in the show, demonstrated by Tachia being subsequently offered two roles in the main house at Royal Exchange, and both Stephen and Olivia securing further roles since their performances also. Whilst it was the genius of the Director that ultimately underpinned those performances, there was someone else who quietly underpinned the Director, and that was Production Manager Chris Whitwood. Without a Production Manager of this quality and assuredness, the pressures and tensions over staging a complete musical (16-songs), with specific technical demands (integrated AV and revolve), in just three weeks on a very tight budget, might easily have become overwhelming. Chris ensured they did not. So far HOAX can be deemed a success. The musical sold out before it even opened, with a standing ovation on the final night. The graphic novel has received great acclaim, being tipped for ‘Best of’ in more than one category. And the public response has been immensely gratifying. There is, however, still a way to go with this project. Firstly the musical needs tightening: something we were only really able to gauge when we saw it on the floor in front of an audience at the Royal Exchange, being that we didn’t have capacity within the project to hold a sharing. Secondly the two strands of the project need more intersection: likely best realised by the graphic novel having some bearing on the musical’s further development, both actual and contextual; and by working on integrated sales. As actor Stephen Myott-Meadows said to me a few days after the show had closed: ‘The performance really breaks you, but then you read the book and – I know your brother dies – but you still really feel a beautiful sense of hope.’ It’s exactly because of this experience, as described perfectly by Stephen, that I feel this project is so important, and why I feel it has great potential within the canon of artworks that deal with mental health. HOAX doesn’t ever shy away from the darkness of mental illness, but it's the light within the project that will truly act to decrease the stigma around this still very difficult debate.

Why Ravi Thornton’s Graphic Memoir is an Early Candidate for the Year’s Best

At a recent conference I attended for English educators, a panel of writers was discussing the phenomenon of the memoir, and debating what the popularity of the form has to say about today’s readership. The objection that the panelists had was the tendency for memoirs to reinforce the spirit of self-preoccupation that characterizes so many of the narratives in contemporary popular culture. These writers had some compelling examples to draw upon, but noticeably absent was any mention of the graphic memoir. I wasn’t really surprised by this, however. If there is a form of writing about one’s experiences that eschews a focus on the self it is the graphic memoir. In works by writers like Alison Bechdel, Sarah Leavitt, and now, Ravi Thornton, the visual canvas seems to steer the memoirist away from self-preoccupation, saying instead to the reader: “This is what happened. See for yourself.” Ravi Thornton’s latest work, HOAX: Psychosis Blues, wants us not only to bear witness to the effects of mental illness, but to reflect on the impact they have both on the individuals themselves and on those closest to them. However, rather than having us simply watch the toll that such an illness takes on her brother, Rob, who ultimately lost his battle with schizophrenia in 2008, Thornton shows us someone capable of remarkable clarity and insight despite the darkness. “Hoax” is the name of a poem that Rob wrote, one that had a profound impact on his sister and prompted her to develop both a stage musical and a graphic novel. The latter begins during Rob’s treatment some months after his first psychotic episode, and then alternates between the years of his illness—short segments that show Ravi’s remembered interactions with her brother—and his own poetry, illustrated by a number of different artists, including Mark Stafford, Hannah Berry, and Bryan Talbot. This alternating narrative scheme is remarkably effective, putting not only a human face on schizophrenia but showing a mind desperately trying to come to terms with it through poetry. Given the subject matter, the reader may suspect that Thornton will simply chart the terrifying effects of mental illness on her brother. However, her penchant for quiet reflection here is brilliant. She demonstrates a special ability to show us schizophrenia’s impact in those day-to-day moments we wouldn’t necessarily think about, like the discussion of a parent’s illness during a quiet car ride or an awkward conservation about the purchase of a phone contract that can’t be paid for. Thornton is so good in these scenes, that when they culminate in an exchange she has with Rob’s metamorphosed essence after he has died, the reader simply accepts it. As Thornton herself notes in the afterword, the graphic novel is not intended as a sequel to her dark stage musical, Hoax: My Lonely Heart, which focuses on the time period leading up to Rob’s first psychotic episode: “Whilst chronologically one follows the other, I don’t really think of the graphic novel as a sequel to the musical. My brother’s manifestations of his illness were so immediate and yet at the same time so distant that I felt compelled to explore both of these extremes.” Indeed, the most intense moments in Hoax: Psychosis Blues can be found in Rob’s poetry, which comes alive across canvases that range from the whimsical to the phantasmagoric, but with verbal-visual combinations that always serve the interests of the poet’s sometimes dark, often profound, and always thought-provoking insights.

Although it’s easy to feel heartbroken by the end of a work whose subject matter is mental illness, the reader instead feels strangely comforted. Like listening to the blues, the process of reading Thornton’s graphic novel is cathartic and speaks to us about a shared experience–not only the shared moments between Ravi and Rob, or what the latter shares with us through his poetry, but what Thornton herself shares about the narrative of mental illness. Indeed, we can only come away from Hoax: Psychosis Blues with a fuller and more profound understanding about schizophrenia and its impact. Later this year, when the debate gets going about the best visual narratives produced in 2014, this exemplary graphic novel by Thornton should be in the discussion. I’m convinced, in fact, it will be.[Read the original review here.]

This is a work which will affect or appeal to people in entirely different ways. That’s apt indeed, for from a subjective standpoint, everyone is unique, including those people who are unfortunate enough to suffer with mental illness. Some people reading this graphic novel will simply admire the truly beautiful artwork from the ten diverse and extremely talented artists which Ravi has managed to assemble. Some will be mesmerised and entranced by the sensate stream of consciousness poetry that provides some measure of insight into the fractured inner world of Ravi’s brother Rob. Others, having experience of what mental illness can do to a family member or loved one – perhaps resulting, as in Rob’s case, in the sad decision to take their own life – will certainly find this work deeply, personally affecting.

However, with all that said, whilst we as human beings like to think we are so very good at putting ourselves in someone else’s place, seeing the world through their eyes, for those individuals whose waking moments can flutter between the highs of near transcendence to the depths of utter purgatory in the mere time it takes for a butterfly to spread its wings, we simply cannot truly know what it is to be like them: to feel, at times, as cruelly and painfully isolated as they do from the rest of us. Because, make no mistake, from a relative standpoint nothing and no one is separate. To have the perception, however, that this is the case, can be the cause of such mental turmoil and suffering, that I personally can understand why someone would choose to end it, even at the expense of their own existence.

Taken as a whole, this work provides a window into both Ravi and Rob’s experience of his struggles with his schizophrenia. The ‘Year’ chapters, in the traditional sequential art comics form, illustrated by Leonardo M. Giron, reveal the story from Ravi’s perspective, showing us moments of joy, despair, hope and resignation, as she tries to support her brother as best she can. These are separated with sequences containing poetry inspired by the extensive body of work Rob left behind, and they vary considerably stylistically in art terms, from what we would again consider traditional comics through to what could probably be accurately described as illustrated prose, though I would contend these sequences are also still very much comics as the artwork does significantly inform the intended narrative in conjunction with the prose in a sequential manner. What these differences in style neatly attest, though, is that the mind of a schizophrenic is an extremely rich, complex, yet fluid and volatile place to inhabit.

I think in terms of portraying Rob’s story, Ravi succeeds admirably. I was moved to tears in several places, by certain incidents or nuances that created a deep, emotional resonance within me, much like I experienced with Nicola Streeten’s BILLY, ME & YOU. I did quite deliberately not read this work on the tram this time though, suspecting I might need my hankie at close hand. It’s just so damn hard to see someone’s suffering brought to life so eloquently through their own words, and so poignantly and illuminatingly illustrated, knowing as you do that ultimately there is no happy ending, well, not at least in the traditional sense. With some people who take their own lives, you can tell there may well have been a palpable element of fear and desperation involved, with others, merely the knowledge that peace would finally prevail. I certainly gained some sense of the latter with Rob.

Art-wise, this work is truly an absolute visual smörgåsbord. Firstly, the ‘Year’ chapters by Leonardo M. Giron are magnificently understated, with a deliberately subdued, almost pastel palette and a slightly chalky feel to the colouring. There is one slight exception to this involving a very special butterfly in the final chapter of which I shall say no more. The art accompanying the poetry is mostly, in contrast, extremely rich and vibrant, with a real eclectic mix of styles. There are a couple of obvious, almost monochromatic exceptions, but they are entirely in keeping with the mood of the moment. It’s hard to pick a favourite, but I can honestly say, as a man who isn’t massively into poetry, they all really beautifully capture the essence of Rob’s words and thus help convey the not-so merry-go-round of his ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic emotional states. Another impressive addition to the recent canon of works dealing frankly with mental illness, alongside the likes of PSYCHIATRIC TALES, DEPRESSO, MARBLES, LIGHTER THAN MY SHADOW.[Read the original review here.]